Ye Jacobites by Name?

Several of the eighteenth-century's major writers have "come under suspicion" of being Jacobites—Behn, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, and Burns form the A-list. Rethinking literary history in these terms produces, for many, a sense of displacement similar to thinking of Shakespeare as a Catholic. That our greatest writers should have been in crucial respects opposed to the direction taken by "progress" or "enlightenment," that they should have remained outside the consensus that made for modern Britain, would not, for all, lead to a comfortable conception of cultural history. There is indeed a working analogy between the late Elizabethan and the late Jacobean periods. Most of the major writers of the later sixteenth century had parents who were Catholic; many must have been faced with conscious choices about which faith to espouse, and several of the most thoughtful—Donne, Jonson, very probably Shakespeare—tergiversated. Any system of belief forced to go underground is going to develop a coded language that can be a rich source of poetic metaphor; Recusancy and Jacobitism may thereby have all the best tunes, as far as poets are concerned. Murray Pittock has argued that the victims of history, the defeated, tend to deploy a "recurrent" or typological, as against a linear or incremental, model of history, as in the once-and-future formulation that, for example, sustains Dryden's translation of the Aeneid.¹ The elegiac, the threnodic, a heightened sense of what might have been, are the predominant cadences of such writing.

Two books devoted to the most thorough contextualization and literary analysis of Pope's Windsor-Forest ever produced, both by Pat Rogers who has a strong claim on the title "greatest living Pope scholar," have added enormous weight to the argument made by earlier scholars, notably Howard Erskine-Hill, that Pope was indeed a Jacobite.² But what exactly was a Jacobite? Those who may not have time to read both books should prioritize Destiny, chapter 3, pages 113 – 29. Here, Rogers provides a very measured and convincing account of the nature of Pope's Jacobite commitment. He would not have been at Braemar in 1715 when the Earl of Mar raised the Jacobite standard, though he was surrounded on all sides by men who were. He knew them very well, counted many of them as among his closest friends, and had most of them on the subscription list for his translation of The Iliad. Pope was fully aware that the Pretender had no chance whatsoever of restoration if he refused, as he did, to repudiate the Catholic faith, but Rogers's verdict is that had the Pretender renounced his faith and undertaken "merely to protect papists from savage discrimination" (116), Pope would have welcomed him. Developing the work of Douglas Brooks-Davies, whose Pope's "Dunciad" and the Queen of the Night (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 1985) gave currency to the resounding phrase "emotional Jacobitism," Rogers would shift Pope somewhat further along the spectrum of active Jacobite sympathy. Brooks-Davies's study of hermetic and occult lore in Pope's poetry met with considerable skepticism at the hands of mainstream Pope scholars on publication. This Dan Brownesque Pope was not at all the kind of poet with whom we sober rationalists wished to have commerce, however subliminally persuasive it might have been: I recall writing in a review that "I had to keep pinching myself to remind myself that I do not believe it." Murray Pittock (whose work, surprisingly, Rogers does not use), has a verdict on Samuel Johnson's putative Jacobitism that in my own view could stand for most of the writers on the above list: "Johnson was a man of Jacobite ideals who distrusted their reality. In this view, Jacobitism becomes part...